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Nerval's Lobster writes "A government official who helped oversee the bug-riddled Healthcare.gov Website has resigned his post. Tony Trenkle, Chief Information Officer (CIO) for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees Healthcare.gov, will reportedly join the private sector after he departs on November 15. A spokesperson for the Medicare agency refused to say whether he had been forced out, telling reporters: 'Tony made a decision that he was going to move to the private sector and that is what our COO announced yesterday.' Because of his supervisory role, Trenkle is considered a significant player in the Website's development; The New York Times indicated that he was one of two federal officials who signed an internal memo suggesting that security protocols for the Website weren't in place as recently as late September, a few days before Healthcare.gov's launch.Following Trenkle's resignation, Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted to the Senate Finance Committee that Healthcare.gov would require hundreds of fixes. 'We're not where we need to be,' she said. 'It's a pretty aggressive schedule to get to the entire punch list by the end of November.' Sebelius added that she was ultimately accountable for what she termed the 'excruciatingly awful' rollout. Healthcare.gov has experienced massive problems since its Oct. 1 debut. In addition to repeated crashes and slow performance, the Website's software often prevents people from setting up accounts. President Obama has expressed intense frustration with the situation, but insists the Affordable Care Act (ACA) backing the Website remains strong. 'The essence of the law, the health insurance that's available to people is working just fine,' he told reporters in October. 'The problem has been that the website that's supposed to make it easy to apply for insurance hasn't been working.' While the federal government won't release 'official' enrollment numbers until the end of November, it's clear that the Website's backers are losing the battle of public perception."

While you might well be correct, the issue at hand is the website. It's a bit disingenuous to say the whole law is broken because of the website. That is, unless the same people who made the law are the ones coding.

Let us suppose that General Motors is incapable of either putting up a website, or of contracting that job out to someone who is competent. Just suppose that General Motors has zero presence on today's internet. None. They are so clueless, that they don't see the need to invest the resources into an online presence. Just pretend that to be true.

Do you really think that such clueless fools could possibly build a safe, reliable automobile? Do you really?

That is what we are seeing with ACA. It's perfectly alright that none of the people in politics understand how to put up a website. What is unforgivable, is that they have no idea how to go about hiring competent people to put up their site.

If they are incapable of attracting and hiring competent people to perform one job, what in the HELL makes anyone think that they can find competent people to perform another job?

1) The government does have an online presence. I don't know where this website falls on the scale of complexity compared to its other websites but most government agencies do indeed have some sort of website. This failure seems to be more of an outlier than the norm.

2) I do expect the government to be better at regulating than giving out successful contracts for two reasons. First, the government lacks control over the contracted company and cannot directly force the company to be successful.

I do expect the government to be better at regulating than giving out successful contracts for two reasons. First, the government lacks control over the contracted company and cannot directly force the company to be successful. Secondly, the government has a lot more experience regulating as it already regulates many industries.

Wow, those must be some pretty dark rose colored glasses you have on. The list of regulation that government has done extremely poorly is incredibly long.

I'll just give you three examples, copyright, the patent system, and prohibition. Three examples of absolutely abysmal, destructive outcomes from gov't regulation. Sure patents and copyright used to be sensible, but the more experience that gov't got in regulating them, the worse they got. However, prohibition was a debacle from the moment they started

There is a bit of a difference between getting a letter from your insurance company that says "Due to the ACA we will be upgrading your plan at no cost to you to comply" and what we are seeing... Letters saying "Due to the ACA, we are canceling your policy effective Jan 1. You are welcome to apply for a much more expensive plan though us or the exchange... If you can even login."

So if a 34 year old single male's plan doesn't currently cover maternity costs and birth control pills but covers everything else with a good network, low deductibles and manageable co-pays he be say thank you for a bill that now covers his birth control pills but will have much more restrictive networks, higher deductibles and higher co-pays because... well.... just because.

There are millions of plans that work quite well and are very comprehensive that do not meet the random requirements of the ACA. The Lead to Aluminum fallacy is just what people like you try to sell yourselves.

No, no it doesn't. Grandfathered in plans were not allowed to change at all since 2011, and that simply is never going to happen over three years. Change the doctors covered under the plan? Plan changed and can't be grandfathered in. Adjust costs due to inflation? Plan changed and can't be grandfathered in. Increase coverage? Plan changed and can't be grandfathered in.

Obamacare was written in such a way to guarantee these plans would be dropped. Period. Obama knew you weren't going to be able to keep your plans. Period.

You can't blame the insurance companies for this. There was no way they were ever going to be able to actually meet the requirements to grandfather in plans, if for no other reason than simple inflation.

And that's exactly what the individual mandate was--a huge compromise of liberal values to adopt a Republican idea. The fact that no Republican voted for it even then shows how spiteful and divisive they are.

Or that they looked at Massachusetts, saw that Romney's attempt at implementing it didn't work, and didn't want to send the nation down the same path. It's not hard to see that Obamacare doesn't and never will work. The HealthCare.gov debacle is proof enough of that.

If the companies couldn't upgrade the policies, how are they even able to offer them in the first place? The simple answer is that they could, but they won't because that won't make you angry at the administration.

Huh? They were able to offer them originally because Obamacare wasn't in force. Obamacare only kills them starting in 2014, which is why people are getting the cancellation letters now.

The only plans Obamacare allows to be grandfathered in are those that were made before 2011 that have never changed. That simply was never going to happen, inflation guarantees that details about the plan must change over time, and as soon as the insurance company changes the plan, it can no longer be grandfathered in under O

Under some plans a rate change of less than $6 from one year to another was enough to exclude it from the grandfathering clause in the ACA. As the GP wrote this was know in advance and was by design. There are several news sites with the internal WH documents and other agency papers that discuss this very thing.

There was even debate amongst Obama's speech writers because it was known during the campaign that this promise had no chance of being kept.

The Government did allow you to keep your plan. It's Aetna that decided to screw you over and try to get you to blame someone else. It seems to have worked, because instead of directing your ire at the insurance industry's thieving, scheming, middle-men, you're angry at the administration trying to reform a horribly broken system in a political climate where it's virtually impossible to get anything done even when you're willing to adopt ideas from the other side as a compromise.

Actually, the Health and Human Services department is empowered to make rules that *all* healthcare plans must obey, including grandfathered ones.

So, you can only grandfather a plan if:A) it never changes, not even to account for inflationB) it obeys all new regulations put out by the Health and Human Services department for health insurance.

The only exception is plans that are part of a collective bargaining agreement(aka unions), those plans are allowed to change without losing grandfathered status so long as the changes are to make it come into agreement with HHS regulations.

And let me tell you, no plan I have ever had will provide female oral contraceptives without a co-pay, so no plan I have ever had could be grandfathered under the current rules.

Millions of people who had insurance that worked for them are discovering that that plan is gone, and the cheapest plan on the exchange costs twice as much, has deductibles far higher, and coverers a smaller network of doctors. This is a very common story.

Something is deeply wrong here the entire premise here was that normal people could find a better plan on the exchange, and if they didn't they could keep the plan they had. Both claims were lies, and predictably so: the ACA is designed to push healthcare costs for the old and sick onto the young and healthy, so everyone young and healthy must, by design, pay a lot more to make the system work.

You high UID and claims of "fake insurance" make it pretty obvious you're a paid astroturfer. We don't like your sort here. Please go away.

They weren't being screwed before. Many of these people had preexisting conditions that were being taken care of for a reasonable cost. Now, their plans are priced for things like gynecological exams for men and prostate exams for women. People treating their cancer are either going to go broke, rely on us to cover the cost, or simply die (plus, be taxed for the privilege). Is that an improvement?

Sadly, you're one of the lucky ones. The average increase to premiums, according to Forbes, is 41%. The only states with reductions are ones where the state government already had set extremely tight controls over their health care markets so the ACA actually adds fewer burdens on their systems.

Actually, I kind of agree with you; The law may be faulty, but sniping at the website problems won't fix the underlying flaws.

Economists know that every attempt at price controls over the last 4500 years (approximately) have resulted in shortages of the goods/services under control, and higher prices for those goods/services. All I needed to know about Obamacare was that it is a form of price control.

I'm 65 years old, and I've been tracking the results of Obamacare among the people I know. (NOT a scientific study.) So far, I'm seeing 8 instances of increased insurance costs (including two people who just qualified for Medicare/Medicaid) for every 1 instance of cost savings. It seems that some States, like NY, are benefitting from the increased competition created by allowing offers across State lines.

It is an Economic Principle that whatever you tax, you will get less of. Obamacare imposes about a 9% additional tax on each employee, and so it is probably going to lead to fewer qualifying jobs in the private sector. The number of part-time and temp jobs seems to be increasing here in Texas, but full-time work is hard to get outside industries such as Medicine and Energy.

The point of the law is to remedy under-insurance, so obviously it will raise insurance costs on average. That's the cost. The benefit is that when people later incur health care expenses, they will collect on the new or improved policies they are now paying more for, instead of paying it all out of pocket, or going broke and pushing the costs on to the rest of us.

It's just silly to count the cost of insurance without counting the benefits of the coverage.

All I needed to know about Obamacare was that it is a form of price control.

Well well.. so you've made up your mind and just looking for facts to support your case. However, I'm afraid to say, you are wrong.

First of all, the ACA is not what is understood in economics as price controls. It is not a price floor, nor a price ceiling.

Secondly, not all price controls are bad. Some are necessary as the market is not always optimal. Most of the time they are enacted to even out bargaining power discrepancies, and it generally makes the economy more efficient when done correctly. For example, there is a reason for the minimum wage - otherwise you have more and more working poor that rely on benefits (however, this didn't stop Wal-Mart due to deficiencies in the minimum wage), or alternatively you can cut all benefits and bring back poor laws and workhouses. There's a reason why we dumped that system.

Because it doesn't make sense for us to subsidize low wages as a society.

I don't want my neighbor to be working and still not be able to feed his family. What's more, I don't want to subsize the company that is making millions off of low-paid staff which then claims benefits. I'd rather employers pay their fair share. If that mean the unemployment rate is a little bit higher, so be it. I'd rather my tax dollars be used to help people that truly need it than some company's bottom line.

"Economists know that every attempt at price controls over the last 4500 years (approximately) have resulted in shortages of the goods/services under control,"that's a blatantly false statement. Corn is price controlled. Do you have any problems at all finding corn?Price control is more complex then the ignorant statement. DO you even now about price floor? price ceiling? other type of price controls?Those where rhetorical, cause clearly you don't.

It's a bit disingenuous to say the whole law is broken because of the website.

No, the original poster is correct. The law is broken because:

It's not a tax since it raises no revenue

The bill did not originate in the proper house of Congress. It was a retitled bill.

How anyone can think the government can force people to hand money to private companies is simply insane. The last time a government tried this was 238 years ago, and we all know the result of that experiment.

It violates ones privacy under the 9th Amendment and most likely several portions of HIPPA.

Plain and simple, the law is broken and only exists because the activist Republican Justice John Roberts doesn't grasp basic Constitutional issues such as limitations on governmental power over the people.

The old system was broken because people without insurance or a method of payment still got healthcare. If doctors would simply kick people out of the door to die on the street whenever they can't pay, we would have a much lower insurance rates and everybody would have their freedom. Of course your rates would still go up because you would have to pay someone to collect the dead bodies littering the grounds outside of hospitals, but it would still be cheaper overall.

False. It comes from bad management, and bad program techniques.It really seems like a system that no one bothered to break the code out into tiny bits laid out over a good API architecture for data sharing.There are good software system of more complex code.

"a badly conceived law could be a reason for the poor performance of the site if it puts overly burdensome constraints on the system."the law is a set of rules to apply. Nothing more. That is no reason for broken code. If you are talking about adding a second or three to a responce, you would be right.

as a side note:" draconianly complex law " doesn't make sense.It could be a byzantine law, but draconianly isn't complex..also, I don't think it's an actual word.

How so? The law passed when the Democrats controlled both houses. Not a single R voted for it, nor were any needed to pass it, so the D's got what they wanted. In fact, R's were kept out of many of the planning meetings.
The reason the law is bad is that it is much too complicated with many facets written as TBD at the HHS Secretary's discretion. The implementation is left to the amorphous bureaucracy. I don't think any of our representatives know what's in the law and none have read it cover-to-cover, at least not before voting it in. It's just too damn long.

The compromise was between far left Democrats and center left Democrats, the Republicans never entered into it. At no point were the Dems who were pushing for this courting or expecting Republican votes, hence the procedural trickery they did in the Senate to pass it, but they did require the blue dogs and other center left Dems.

As for the Republican alternative, it was not to pass an omnibus bill which almost never leads to good results, but to pass separate bills to correct flaws in the system in a more piecemeal and less painful way; a method that would make it easier to make corrections as they arose as well as ensure a better understanding of each individual bill and it's impacts.

They wanted to remove restrictions on cross border insurance purchases (to allow for more competition), they proposed allowing individuals to claim the same deductions as businesses to try and break the employer based system, there was also support for legislation to remove lifetime limits and help people with preexisting conditions and even for leaving your adult kids on your family plan (under certain conditions). Their main issue was that because these were separate proposal and not a blanket catch all bill, people like you either through ignorance (which could be due to the lack of media coverage of these proposals) or simple denial, continually state they had no alternative.

Haha, that's an interesting take on history. I think then senator Olympia Snowe would disagree. The wingnuts walked away from negotiations in an attempt to bloody Obama's nose, and throw meat at their based. The template for the law was originally put forward by the heritage foundation, and was supported by top conservatives (such as Gingritch) up until 2008. Guess the GOP didn't know how to declare victory and walk away. I mean, if Obama is for it, then every "true" conservative must fight the SOCIALIST TYRANNY.

At no point were the Dems who were pushing for this courting or expecting Republican votes, hence the procedural trickery they did in the Senate to pass it, but they did require the blue dogs and other center left Dems.

"No public option. No play-or-pay. No things that are going to lead to any rationing of health care. No interference with the doctor-patient relationship," says Grassley. "About the only place we haven't made progress along the lines of what Republicans are wanting on the bill is in tort reform."

And by repeatedly invited you actually mean, invited on TV but never actually allowed into the meetings. In fact few legislators of either side were actually involved in writing this law (except for inserting special exemptions) as it was mostly written by healthcare company insiders and lobbyists.

Even years later most politicians have no idea what is or is not part of the ACA.

The reason the law is so complex is that American health policy is made not by a process of examining the options rationally and picking out the best ones, but by a process of political compromise,

If we looked around the world for health care systems that are working (in terms of price, quality and service), we would probably pick something like the Canadian single payer system.

Instead, we had to accommodate every powerful interest group, campaign contributor, and free-market ideologue. Why do we need a private insurance industry? We don't, they just have a good lobby.

The free market health care system doesn't work unless you're willing to let people die when they can't afford health care. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1312793 [nejm.org] So how do the right-wingers get out of that? They come up with a system of subsidies (which they call tax refunds). In order to figure out who "deserves" to get what subsidy, they have to examine every applicant's income, expenses, and circumstances and apply arbitrary formulas.

Because it incorporates tax payments and other grants, you have a system which is as complicated as the entire tax system and a welfare application combined.

Then you have to please these economic theorists who believe (despite 40 years of evidence) that if people have to pay co-payments, they'll be wiser medical consumers. So you've just made a simple system complex. Then you have to provide "choice" of silver, gold, platinum and lead policies, so you have to do the same thing four times over.

By the time you've finished compromising with every interest group, you have an enormously complicated health care financing system, which may not even be precisely designed or logically consistent. So when you try to write code, you have to go back and clarify the policy that you're implementing in code.

Compare that to the Canadian system: You hand your Canadian Medicare card to the receptionist, and she swipes it. The government pays for it.

You're entertainingly deluded if you think Canada is a single-payer system.

We have a tiered healthcare system, it's just that most people don't seem to acknowledge it.

I have partial coverage from my province. I have partial coverage from my employer. And I cover the rest out of pocket.

My mother-in-law, having turned 65, but is still working, has even more payers: the province, her employer's health care coverage, the provincially-mandated health care coverage (different pocket, not sure if she pays for it or not), and then the rest out of pocket.

There are health-related items that are fully covered by provincial plans, some that are partially covered, and many that are not covered at all. For the last two categories, private health insurance can cover all, some, or none of the extra costs. If you have multiple health insurance providers (e.g., two different employers for a household, usually they cover the employee and their spouse and kids, so you have two insurances covering the household), there is some sort of duking it out for who covers what, but, in the end, you usually end up with the higher percentage of the choices being covered somehow. And then, whatever is left, is your responsibility.

I go to the doctor with a cold. The province pays the doctor for my visit. He wrongly prescribes me some antibiotics. I go to the pharmacy, get the pills. The province doesn't pay for any of that (though they play a role in regulating the drug costs). My employer's health insurance pays some of the drug cost (the percentage widely varies on which drug it is) and none of the pharmacy fees (other insurances do pay for pharmacy fees). I then pay the rest, never less than 10% due to the plan I have with work.

If I then spend more than a certain percentage of my pre-tax income on health expenses, I can submit them against my taxes for a further refund, though I've never hit that amount, personally. I'm sure lower incomes could easily hit that.

If I go to the optometrist's, the province pays nothing for my visit, but all of my children's visits as they're all under 18 years of age. I submit to my employer's health insurance for my visit and any and all prescription eye wear that results, including for my children.

If you cannot get health insurance from your employer, or you cannot afford to get insurance on your own (here in Alberta, there is a cheap provincial-run insurance available for purchase, not sure about other provinces, and no idea what kind of coverage it gets you), you get to pay full costs for chiropractic and vision care. Dental visits are also not covered, or any orthodontic care. If you're poor, you're going to be stuck with bad eyes and bad teeth. Even in Canada. Because you're in the bottom tier of health care. Which itself is because we have tiered healthcare.

Sure, emergency access is paid for. But same in the US - effectively. If you can't afford it in the US, the hospitals eventually absorb the cost, by law. In Canada, the government absorbs it. However, if you can't produce your healthcare card, you're still responsible to pay for it - tourists and out-of-province patients don't get free rides. (However, when I was in Toronto a couple months ago, had I required health care during that time, my home province would have covered the costs same as if I were at home. Which, again, means not everything is covered.)

You have to prove residency. Some people, especially the homeless, don't. (Though even the homeless can - they have to simply jump through hoops not dissimilar to those proposed by your Republicans for voter identification - which also is not a problem in Canada, I don't understand what your Democrats have against it.)

I also have lifetime and yearly caps on my employer-provided insurance in some areas (orthodontics, off the top of my head, would be the first one).

Yet the KY site is running just fine and has good enrollment. That would indicate it's the website at the moment. You can't blame the law until it actually goes into effect and we see the results. Well you can blame the law but you'll just be another one of those haters you isn't using evidence based arguments.

The work on Healthcare.gov grew out of a contract for open-ended technology services first issued in 2007 with a place-holder value of $1,000. There were 31 bidders. An extension, awarded in September 2011 specifically to build Healthcare.gov, drew four bidders, the documents show, including CGI Federal.

I used mod points in section which are now wasted, but it was worthwhile to correct this post. The Obama Administration only reviewed only a single bid for the Obamacare website http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2537194 [washingtonexaminer.com]. Whether that constitutes a no bid contract can be argued, but that is usually what is meant by that phrase. If you do not consider that a no bid contract then Halliburton was not awarded a no bid contract in Iraq. Calling the statement that this is a no-bid contract a myth is at best disingenuous.

Having open bids and only one "bidder" is actually different than sole source/no bid.

I would say yes and no. You can always write a contract such that there can only be one bidder. You just add restrictions that no one else can meet. Must have thousands of hours in experience building government exchanges would be a good choice.

It doesn't matter, because the people raising the complaints don't understand software engineering in the slightest. If anyone here has ever released a first version of entire multi-function web-application without a lot of bugs on release day, they almost certainly spent a positively absurd amount of time(like a year or more) on nothing but QA.

Every single person inside our industry ought to know that software engineers produce 10x as many features as other engineers with 1000x as many defects(and that's

It doesn't matter, because the people raising the complaints don't understand software engineering in the slightest. If anyone here has ever released a first version of entire multi-function web-application without a lot of bugs on release day, they almost certainly spent a positively absurd amount of time(like a year or more) on nothing but QA.

Every single person inside our industry ought to know that software engineers produce 10x as many features as other engineers with 1000x as many defects(and that's low balling it) in a given timespan.

All I know is +$200m website budget(in excess of $600m total for entire system) pays for a lot of QA and since the project appearently didn't even go to the lowest bidder they dont get to claim lack of resources...

Also there is a world of difference between having bugs and being incapable of performing to the minimium requirement specification.

That $600MM figure is, naturally, a fabrication. That's the total amount of all software contract work by the entire department of health and human services in the time-frame of 2009-2013. Needless to say, if you can't imagine what other outlays that might include, you're crazy. $93MM(the real number) is still a lot, but 9 women can't delivery a baby in a month.

"..they almost certainly spent a positively absurd amount of time(like a year or more) on nothing but QA."every agile managed project I have done had an absurd low number of bugs on releas. as in less then 20.And we are talking every where from 20K LoC to over a million LoC

Did you know facebook rolls out changes to production every 11.5 seconds?

If you're not a US Citizen, you might not be aware that the new healthcare law which Healthcare.gov was built to service was advanced by the current President (a Democrat) amid much controversy, and the opposition party (Republican) is firmly against it. There have been media blitzes (propaganda efforts, if you will) on both sides of the political fence around the failure of the website. I think all parties can agree that it has been a bit of a political embarrassment for the President.

I think all parties can agree that it has been a bit of a political embarrassment for the President.

I'm not sure how much of a political embarrassment it really is. Yeah it should be working, but I'm not sure embarrassment is the right word. The right wants to make the website it an embarrassment, but they would want to paint whatever happens as an embarrassment even if the website worked perfectly. The left wishes the website would have worked. But with close to 2 months left before anyone is required to have insurance, there's still time.

Look at previous administrations for more embarrassing things. Bush with his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, lies about WMD, and everything that resulted in the "War on Terrorism". That's an embarrassment. With Clinton, the affair with Monica Lewinsky and all that came with that was an embarrassment.

If Obama is going to be embarrassed politically, I think it should be more for his domestic and international spying programs.

The whole world is aware. We all follow US politics. It's just so entertaining - like professional wrestling, but with slightly less violence. Our own politicians are mostly all very sensible and boring, nowhere near so much fun to watch.

I just wonder how they will maintain security protocols with all these different entities they are bringing in last minute to the help fix the code. If they screw up and don't protect user information, things will get a lot worse.

Look, I use Linux and love Linux and am even considering fully switching away from Windows but let me just say that cost is not only measured in money. It's also measured in time. There are certain users for whom Windows (7) will provide all the functionality they need without ever needing an additional driver, or a new window manager (KDE vs Unity vs Gnome), or a custom screensaver (why does Ubuntu not come with a screensaver?), etc, etc. We're doing ourselves a disservice by assuming everyone wants what we want. A lot of people are genuinely comfortable with Windows and our refusal to see that only clouds our vision, not Microsoft's.

The difference is, the fighters are hugely complex and bleeding edge. A website is pretty old hat in 2013.

From what I've read, it's actually sorta the opposite. The healthcare.gov site is generally described as a bureaucratic database horror story. Multiple databases, actually, each with its own API (that's poorly documented), each one elsewhere on the Net, with unrealistic response-time "requirements" written by managers with little distributed-DB experience. And no understanding that messages between sites can't move faster than the speed of light.

Funny thing is that I've also read a number of comments recently about the zillions of cases where new decrees from Congress are handled by thousands of government web sites within a day or two. Thus, the recent "shutdown" was handled gracefully by most departments' web sites, and they were back up within a day or so when the people were called back to work.

So it's not that "the government" can't handle building and revising web sites. Thousands of departments are doing it the job routinely, and nobody notices because it usually goes smoothly.

But healthcare.gov by its very nature has attracted the attention of every politician within reach, most of which qualify as PHBs who want their name attached to the results but are otherwise clueless about this InterWeb stuff. The result is a flood of conflicting orders coming down to the grunts doing the actual web-site development, with radical changes appearing in their inboxes daily.

I'm sure that lots of readers here can identify with this situation. How often have the rest of you seen exactly this sort of mess in a corporate setting? I'm sure we can collect a lot of good horror stories. Or we can just go over to The Daily WTF and read about (or submit them) them there.

That is pretty much true. I'm not a gamer. I like to play a game now and then, but I don't view computers as gaming machines. I won't pay fifty or sixty dollars for a game, and I certainly won't jump through the hoops necessary to make a game work, on Windows, Linux, or any other platform. I won't invest in a gaming platform.

The things I expect a computer to do, however, are pretty easy to do on Linux. Crunch numbers, communicate with the outside world, watch multimedia, solve moderately complex proble

That is true. But what we can do is divided large sophisticated software packages (OS or applications) into 2 categories.

“Big Bang” packages where the entire packaged is released at once. Vista and Health Care web site are two examples. These have a history of delays, cost overruns, and initial releases performing poorly. This is particularly true for government ones.

“Evolutionary” packages which come about from a lot of small incremental changes. Linux and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 are 2 examples. Issues are know so things are stable. Thing gradually get better. Lots of legacy code that lend itself to lots of legacy “features” (a.k.a. bugs).

By choosing the “big bang” method we know the kind of troubles we are going to run into. As such extra effort should have been put into delivering requirements on time so adequate testing could be done. At times this means rejecting additional features or (in the worst case) functionality.

I totally object to your language and argument. It is inflammatory without being relevant.

I agree that Obamacare is bad economics, and I have the opinion that it was rammed down our throats by a Socialist mob, but faulty argumentation is not going to get people focusing on WHAT's right; it just keeps the focus on WHO's right. (or who thinks they are right.)

At this point I'm so fed up with politicians I think they should all be fired for not focusing on solutions that work for everybody, or at least almost e

I believe this post IS "ethanol fueled", as it is certainly not the work of a sober person. There is at most, ONE correct statement in it. For example - The ACA limits the amount that insurance companies can crank up rates, and so will likely cut the huge profits they have been collecting. It also makes it impossible for the insurance companies to "cherry-pick" customers, and, only provide policies for the healthy folks who do not need them and will not put in a claim. It also stops the insurance

The shutdown happened the same day as the launch so had no impact on the website at all. Also the shutdown came down to a single bill, that was held up by senate DEMOCRATS that would have fully funded the government, including further aspects of the ACA, if only the individual mandate was pushed back for 1 year (there were previous proposals by the House prior to the shutdown but that was the final one that was offered that the Dems refused to even allow for a vote).

Obama has a higher percentage of appointments pass confirmation then Bush did. He has however, attempted to make fewer appointments than either Bush or Clinton which leave a lot of voluntary vacancies.

I'm sure she's taking a lot more shit in the press than your average Secretary does, especially when you consider the ACA battle. Not saying feel sorry for her, just that she probably thought it would be a cushy job, and she instead deals with a lot of outrage, both manufactured and real. Maybe she means accountable for her expectations, not accountable as in what you or I would consider accountable.

Is that what unemployed people are called nowadays? No wonder reported unemployment is so low, contrary to all observable evidence. Certainly he won't be going into a "job" straight away - who in their right mind will hire him?

As with all politically connected people, I'm sure a soft landing "place" was made for him in one of the companies owned/operated by one of the generous political donors to the current overlord administration's party, so he would be comfortable vacating his current cushy post before he became a total embarassment.

This is probably not too dissimilar to how some dictators seem to find themselves living with an annual stipend in some remote area of the world...

Watched that Kathleen Sebelius yesterday. She basically read the marketing spiel for 20 minutes. Anytime she was asked a question she had no real answers.She has no clue at all what shes doing. How long it's really going to take. Or how broken it really is. She has failed completely at her JOB.And this wasn't some last minute thing. They have had YEARS and a huge pile of money to get done a simple task.

You think the grand plan to get public buy in on government run single payer was to completely botch the roll out of government directed public healthcare? I'm not sure I follow the logic there.

Then you don't know how the left work.

First they create a problem, then they offer a 'solution', which was the policy they wanted in the first place. When have they ever offered a solution which consisted of rolling back the policy that caused the problem?

I'm not sure whether this was just a case of incompetence or intentionally botched, but it doesn't really matter. When people start screaming about how they can't get insurance because they can't get on the web site, and, in any case, the other people who have been able to get on the web site discovered their insurance would cost many times what they were previously paying, the 'solution' won't be to scrap the whole law, it will be to eliminate insurance any have the government run everything.

Two: massive requirements base to develop specification for development and implementation: The PPACA was 1800+ pages, and the associated regulations are 10,000+ pages, and are STILL changing. Can't develop without a spec and design, with big parts of requirements still changing.

Three: inadequate testing. The above-referenced link states that security testing BEGAN in August 2013, less than two months before rollout. There's no mention of load testing.UPDATE: There WAS load testing, Radio reports say it was tested with a 1000-user simultaneous load. EXPECTED was 60K simultaneous users. . .
However, the only CONCRETE numbers I've found [mediaite.com] say it crashed at several hundred simultaneous users. . ..

Four: Integration issues. The Obamacare Exchange system combines data from numerous agencies and systems, and integrating between them is always a difficult task.

Five: Identity-management. This is in parallel to Integration, somehow all identities need to be federated into a single overarching system.

Twenty-three (now 25) months, even with a top-flight team, would simply not be enough to do this: this is a 5-7 year job. . .

Even if there was load testing, in my experience load and stress testing is within the test community not something that is very well developed. Two days ago I spoke about performance testing on a 4 day conference ( http://www.eurostarconferences.com/ [eurostarconferences.com] ) and my talk was the only one that dealt with performance.

In my view, this fields needs to be better developed. Tests usually focus just on response times, based on usage profiles that are practically fantasy. Monitoring of the systems is minimal, and the que

I've been on enough big-bang massive IT projects to know that this is no different from anything we've seen before.- Ambiguous requirements that aren't settled, and constantly changing (stuff that even "agile" can't account for): This is always a killer. Even an "agile" project can't have the framework ripped down and rebuilt at the last second...some decisions have to be permanent.- Contractors who just want to collect money : Outsourcing is always more expensive and produces worse results than if you do it in house. The only thing you save is the cost of employees, but you pay more in the long run.- Entrenched groups who don't want to see it succeed: ERP implementations often fail because the business processes that need to be changed are held up by people or groups that don't want their job changed or automated away, and have powerful friends.- Massive time pressure: I don't know why software development and IT are so different from engineering projects, but there is still the persistent myth that you can throw bodies at a late project to make it come in on time. You can't do this with a construction project of any reasonable size...there are still dependencies. Yet, there's always pressure to make arbitrary dates.

Seriously, replace "government healthcare insurance marketplace connecting people with thousands of insurers" with "SAP implementation", and you see the same problems.

I can see why they made this guy resign though -- someone has to be the scapegoat. At one of the companies I worked at, the much-loved founder of the company was thrown out by the board (it had grown into a public company) after a massive operations disaster that forced him to go out and publicly apologize. Some of it might have been willful blindness, but executives tend to say "I'm paying millions of dollars, just make this happen and don't bother me with details." Consulting companies love these kind of executives....

"Entrenched groups who don't want to see it succeed: ERP implementations often fail because the business processes that need to be changed are held up by people or groups that don't want their job changed or automated away, and have powerful friends."

I've been reading a report on the London Ambulance Services fiasco in 1994, and the final report mentioned something similar - you can't expect a computer system to change working practices, the practices have to change first.

"Ambiguous requirements that aren't settled, and constantly changing "But that can be mitigated with a good underlying architecture. The parts they are changing are mostly business rule changes. Properly architecture business layer can handle that.

Here's the root of the problem and would explain why Obama, Sebelius, and other bureaucrats are sticking to their guns. They believe that they are smarter than the software engineers charged with building this monstrosity. From my own experience, I once got into a pissing contest with a senior VP over something I had developed for the department. He had no background in software or computers. None. Even though the guy had a Mac on his desk, he didn't understand the concept of windows and insisted on using a single one to view his files opening hundreds of turn-down triangles. Hundreds. But I digress. The guy only understood image, flash, and how things looked. His precious weekly schedules had to look pretty rather than be functional to the point where the secretaries were spending an entire day putting together a weekly schedule in QuarkXPress. So I built a database system (with the assistance of one of the secretaries) to generate these schedules. But the database engine we had available to us, while it could use fancy fonts, didn't understand variable character widths. So printing schedules using dingbats was a nightmare. During a presentation, some flunky asked if we could make some changes. The secretary said "Well I don't know. We're jumping through a lot of hoops to make it do what you're seeing now. I don't know if it's possible." The VP said "It's possible" without even asking me. I nearly quit that day. As a matter of interest, a few of my coworkers and I had a daily reading from The Dilbert Principle.

Point is that Obama and his minions don't understand that you can't set arbitrary deadlines for technology when they know nothing about it. It's the same as ignorant politicians setting lofty fuel economy standards without talking to automotive engineers to find out if the goal is realistic or even possible. The politicians believe their own hype in that they think they are smarter than the engineers. At the very least. One can also make the case that unrealistic goals aren't set out of ignorance but by design to suit their ideology. E.g. Set a pollution standard bar so high that it either isn't possible or that it's so expensive that nobody will bother and voila, the source of that pollution is gone taking all the benefits (jobs, consumer savings, useful product) with it. To the politician, the ends justify the means because in their mind, the citizenry is too stupid to understand it.

They had 3 years to get this thing working. And yet they didn't solicit A) domestic companies and B) companies with a lot of experience in handling massive amounts of users and data. 330 million people are supposed to be required to use this site. Today, it was reported that it can only handle 1100 per day. At that rate, it will take over 800 years to sign everybody up. Even if you only consider the 4.2 million people who have just had their insurance taken away from them, that's going to be 10 years b

I literally just went to the site on seeing this article. It took, as the Computerworld article yesterday said on the benchmarking it had done, about 3-4 sec to get to the home page. Once I told noscript to allow it, I then went to "look at options before signing up" (or whatever it was), and it responded at least as fast as slashdot loads.

So, what is this "still a disaster"? Is the headline writer/OP right up there with Ron Paul, who let a senior campaign staffer *die* last year during the campaign, because he apparently couldn't be bothered to provide healthcare to even his senior staff, nor pay them enough to buy their own...?

News reports are now saying he refused to sign off on the websites security.

When he wouldn't sign off on the website they went over his head to get a temporary security authorization from his boss, who, despite several warnings about holes throughout the system, didn't seem to have an issue signing off.

But you tell me, if you are a cook who cooks great 3 min omlets and some smuck comes inand gives you $1000 for a 1 minute omlete , what do you do ?

I tell you what I wouldn't do - give him a salmonella-inducing, raw fucking egg and call it an omelette. Because I'm not a moral-less piece of shit who values profits over the health and safety of my customers.

If the job can't be done under the criteria set forth, it can't be fucking done under the criteria set forth. You tell the fuckers that, and when they say, "well, we'll pay you extra to make the impossible happen," you politely decline, tip your hat, and be about your fucking business. Because guess what? When shit hits the fan and people start to suffer actual harm, who do you think is going to end up on that cross - the assholes that paid for it, or the idiot who tried to make a quick buck by willfully poisoning his customer base?

They did, but as they could not legally force individual states to pay for those exchanges the Supreme Court said it was in fact optional.

As for the "Every state that has it's own exchange has been fine" line, that's patently untrue. Many states are experiencing the same problems as the federal site, some because they have to hit the Federal site to get information, and for some that are not, that is because they are primarily handling Medicare enrollment and not actual insurance.